Dating Up and Down

A female med­ical stu­dent writes to Salon to ask for advice on her boyfriend:

Now I have met some­one who is just every­thing that I felt was miss­ing in my last rela­tion­ships. I find him very attrac­tive; we laugh all the time about stu­pid things and seri­ous things. We have trav­eled together and every day is fun. Even when we argue we are able to see eye to eye at the end. He adores me and treats me good. But he doesn’t have an edu­ca­tion, nor is he on the path to obtain­ing one. He has drive, but he is seri­ously lack­ing the follow-through aspect. He talks very big about his future, but he is happy with the present. He has a high school edu­ca­tion and has a very secure gov­ern­ment job that earns him enough. There is no impe­tus for change. I have dis­cussed sev­eral times about him going back to uni­ver­sity or get­ting a trades course, just any­thing to improve his cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. He shows inter­est, but more so at my insistence.

I am attrac­tive and out­go­ing and I have dated at least a dozen (serious/not seri­ous), if not two dozen, to find this guy whom I really like, but it really both­ers me that he is let­ting his life slip by with­out even try­ing. It both­ers me that he has been gifted with health, and a sound mind, a good sup­port­ive fam­ily, and he doesn’t want to make the best of it. It both­ers me that there are peo­ple in less for­tu­nate cir­cum­stances who are doing 10 times the work to get ahead in life, and mean­while he is not even try­ing. Although it may seem like I am high and mighty and judg­ing those with­out a uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion, I am not. My par­ents do not have it, and I love them to pieces. I think that it was see­ing them go through the strug­gles of hav­ing no edu­ca­tion and immi­grat­ing to a new coun­try that made me real­ize what amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties North Amer­ica offers if you just try. I believe that we only live this life once, so why not give it all you’ve got.

As I wrote in a lengthy essay, women are find­ing the dat­ing scene more dif­fi­cult as they become more edu­cated and suc­cess­ful in mod­ern times. Women tend to date “up” as a result of evo­lu­tion­ary psychology. (Not all, but most.) As a woman gains advanced degrees and high-level jobs, the por­tion of men in the dat­ing pool whom she will con­sider as mates will decline. (How many female CEOs will date plumbers?) This is mod­ern why women are both increas­ingly suc­cess­ful yet more stressed as far as their rela­tion­ships are going. The woman who wrote this let­ter to Salon is no different.